Coaching For Leaders

Phil Le-Brun: The Octopus Organization Phil Le-Brun is an executive in residence at Amazon Web Services and a former corporate VP and international CIO at the McDonald’s Corporation. He is a sought-after speaker and has been featured in Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, and The Guardian. He is the co-author with Jana Werner of The Octopus Organization: A Guide to Thriving in a World of Continuous Transformation (Amazon, Bookshop)*. Most of us have gone through some version of a reorg. A lot of leaders have also implemented their own reorgs. Sometimes they work. Many times, they don’t. In this conversation, Phil and I discuss what goes wrong with reorgs and how we can do better. Key Points Organizations traditionally looked like the tin man from The Wizard of Oz: perfectly planned, many interchangeable parts, not flexible. An octopus organization adapts, works independently to serve the larger whole, and is innately curious. A reorg that starts with an org chart misses the complex organic conn